What Makes A Good Education App?
During and after the pandemic, Education Technology, aka EdTech, mobile apps have gained popularity. In fact, during the first thirty days of the outbreak, Coursera registered 10.3 million new enrollments, which is a 644% increase in comparison to the same period last year.
With the increasing trend of education technology in 2021, both the educational institutions as well as education app development companies are finding ways to enhance the learning experience through implementing innovative technologies.
We all encounter many scenarios where the education industry is trying to utilize technologies like AR/VR. The use of such technologies would require high-bandwidth networks, and fortunately, 5G is here. 5G will make cloud computing a much more convenient and effective way to process information. Lastly, blockchain technology will ensure maximum security for educational institutions and EdTech organizations.
Image Source: Crunchbase
You might wonder what makes a good education app. How can you generate faster ROI from your EdTech app? Well, there is no straightforward answer to this. However, throughout our journey of developing EdTech apps at Nimble AppGenie, we’ve seen that the technology (that your app is built upon), the feature set of your app, and the development methodologies that are used, play a significant role in the success of your EdTech app.
The Crucial Features for an Education App
Gamification
Gamification used to be considered irrelevant for educational apps a few years ago. But, due to the advancement of education technology and evolving expectations of learners, it has become essential to incorporate gamification into the EdTech apps.
Learners face challenges while playing educational games, and it triggers a sense of competitiveness in them. You can make it more effective by integrating social platforms with your EdTech app so that the learners can see their friends’ progress.
Robust and Supportive Database
The educational material makes an EdTech app worth using — keeping in mind that the education content and user data can exist in many forms, including video, text, images, GIFs etc. All of these will be uploaded to the database. Hence your database should be robust and supportive to low-bandwidth networks.
Considering the mobile network coverage across the world, it is hard to say that most of your users will have 4G or 5G internet connection. It will therefore make the user experience more convenient if your app can be fluently used in low-bandwidth connections.
Seamless Onboarding
Be it any mobile app, onboarding a new customer into the database is mostly a daunting task that asks for a significant level of brainstorming. However, due to regulatory requirements as well as EdTech app personalization, it is essential to build seamless onboarding experiences for the users.
By seamless, I mean that the users can quickly create their profile within a few steps. However, you need to ask users about their details to personalize the learning experience from the beginning.
Learning Personalization using AI and ML
Every student is different in terms of grasping power and learning patterns, and thus, it would help if your EdTech app can provide them with personalized courses and practice tests. When you have technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning in place, it no longer is a reasonable excuse to keep the EdTech app curriculum in a cookie-cutter format.
Easy to Understand UI
An easy-to-understand and navigate user interface (UI) is one of the most crucial features for every mobile app, and EdTech mobile apps are no different. The easy to comprehend UI will help your app stand out from the competitor apps. Also, always try to create a more superior UI than your competitors; you don’t have to sail on the same boat.
Comprehensive and Meaningful Content
Undoubtedly, bringing classroom content online is not a cakewalk. The course designers have to spend a hefty amount of time to make the content worth reading online. The curriculums should be explicitly designed for your target audience.
Interactive Sessions Powered by Video Lectures
Online education environments like recorded videos, coupled with doubt sessions, make learning interactive for the users. Additionally, you can enable the students to make queries during the live lectures.
Feedbacks are also important. You can ask the students to leave their feedback on the lectures they attended. It will help you to improve the user experience for your students.
Practice sets and mock tests
Not every educator is tech-savvy. In fact, most of the educators have trouble uploading content on the EdTech app. You should make sure that the educators can upload the education material such as questions and test papers without any hassle. I always recommend that EdTech app owners allow students to personalize practice sets as per their levels.
Push Notifications
Push notifications is a must-have feature for self-learning EdTech apps. It is beneficial to retain users when the self-learners lose their pace. You can notify the learners with intuitive messages that motivate them to start self-learning again.
Not only for the self-learning apps, push notifications are crucial for School Information Systems and other educational apps. It can alert students about scheduled tests or lectures.
Conclusion
Indeed, EdTech apps are making learning more accessible and interactive than ever before. The features mentioned above will help you build a valuable and successful EdTech app that drives ROI.
However, the most important thing to remember is that before you jump into developing your full-fledged EdTech app, consider building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and test your idea. If you see success, you can then build your desired EdTech app that incorporates all the required features.
